Rich Buchanan out at Ooma

I missed this in February via, hdvoicenews.com

By Doug Mohney, on February 8th, 2010

After two years as Ooma’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Rich “The Dude” Buchanan is departing the company for another project.

Makes one wonder who is left there.

I understand the company has raised about $61 million and have obtained approx. 100K customers (for which they must provide phone service for life). No one outside the company knows how much of that money they have left – rumors suggest they have burned though over $50 million, but know knows.  Hard to say when they’ll next need more money or how hard it will be to get more or how close they are to positive cash-flow (if it costs them $600 to get a customer that pays them $300 and brings liability of lifetime service, not sure that line ever crosses into the black). I was pretty amazed to see them raise as much as they have over the past few years, and especially last summer when money was really tight.

But man, $50 million, if that number is close to reality – Wow.

Apparently some of the early investors took it in the shorts – the most recent round of financing was based on a reported $30 million valuation (note that amount is less than they have raised).

BTW, by most accounts, Ooma has very happy customers in general and their voice quality is generally regarded as being very good among VoIP services.  It might be one of those deals where the customers “love them to death” kind of like WebVan.